Premier Li Keqiang leads a meeting that solicited suggestions for the draft of this year's Government Work Report in Beijing on Wednesday. WU ZHIYI/CHINA DAILY Li: Grassroots wisdom should be unleashed to solve problems Premier Li Keqiang highlighted the importance of high-quality talent recruitment and basic research, such as mathematics, to better proceed with innovation-driven development. That was part of Li's responses on Wednesday to suggestions made by professionals in higher education, science and technology, cultural protection, healthcare and sports to the draft of the Government Work Report. The report will be delivered by the premier to the National People's Congress next month. Nine people, including university presidents, a famous volleyball coach, an actor and a deliveryman, were invited to speak at a State Council meeting and offer their suggestions. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the country has made enormous achievements in all courses under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee, Li said. Grassroots wisdom should be unleashed to solve problems closely related to people's lives, he said. Dou Xiankang, president of Wuhan University in Hubei province, suggested the role of high-level talent be fully developed in building an innovation-driven country. He also called for more support to universities in the central and western parts of China. Shi Yigong, president of Westlake Institute of Advanced Study in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, said excellent privately-run universities should be encouraged and supported. Li said high-quality development, proposed at the 19th CPC National Congress, demands a large amount of high-quality talent. Governments at all levels should promote balanced distribution of educational resources, create a fair environment and give universities more autonomy in routine operations and talent cultivation. More technological inputs should be made into basic research, such as mathematics, said Chen Zhiming, director of the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific & Engineering Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Li said basic research, as the foundation of an innovation-driven strategy, should be reinforced because no original innovation and key technological breakthroughs can be made if basic research is not strong. Incentive policies should be improved to make researchers fully dedicated to their research and encourage professionals to make more original and breakthrough achievements. At the meeting, Li also discussed issues of cultural protection, the film industry, mass-market sports, express delivery and family farms. The premier said more technologies should be used to better protect ancient cultural heritage, after Fan Shijin, honored president of Dunhuang Academy in Gansu province, called for a balance between cultural protection and tourism. Lang Ping, head coach of China's women's volleyball team, said more fitness facilities should be built and the sports industry should be boosted to meet public demand for better health. debossed-wristbandsilicone wristband usb flash driveprinted wristbandspaw print silicone braceletscolor-filled-wristbandwristbands for eventsembossed-wristbandcheap silicone wristbands for fundraising
HONG KONG - Over 7,000 new microbial species in the oceans were discovered by researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), which made the results public on Monday.The new species found including acidobacteria, a natural medicinal phylum with the CRISPR gene editing system discovered at sea for the first time, shedded new light on human's understanding of microbial biodiversity in the oceans and brought hope to the development of new drugs.Led by Qian Peiyuan, a professor of the Department of Ocean Science at HKUST, the research team collaborated with peers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, University of Georgia in the United States and University of Queensland in Australia on sourcing water samples across Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.Over a span of eight years, the team developed biofilms with the water samples on different materials, eventually discovering more than 7,000 new biofilm-forming species and 10 new bacterial phyla, breaking the existing belief that the world has only 35,000 marine microbial species and 80 bacterial phyla.Acidobacteria, one of the new marine phyla identified in this research known only exist in terrestrial soils previously, has been used for developing novel antibiotics and anti-tumor drugs due to its high level of biosynthetic gene clusters.This is the first ocean species found to contain gene-editing system CRISPR, which is a family of DNA sequences found within the genomes of bacterial organisms like Escherichia coli. It confers resistance to foreign plasmids or phages and contains gene-editing capabilities.The CRISPR technology is widely used in agro-industrial and pharmaceutical genetic engineering to improve yield for soybeans, corn and rice, for instance, through enhancing the resistance of crops to pollution and natural disasters."The discovery of new marine microbial species has not only improved our understanding of ocean biodiversity, but more importantly, these species have big potential, both in terms of facilitating our understanding of lives and offering new clues to our search of new treatments for diseases," said Qian.The finding was published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
